Contact: jean dot bond at tinybirds dot com
Summary
Experienced in building and leading trusted and engaged documentation teams, creating clear, user-centered documentation, and partnering effectively with product and engineering teams as a trusted collaborator. Brings investigative journalism skills to technical writing, with expertise in docs-as-code workflows, information architecture, and AI-assisted documentation.
Professional Experience
Documentation Lead
Instabase — San Francisco, CA (Remote) January 2022 – November 2025
- Built Instabase's first technical writing team, hiring and mentoring three writers, including coaching a mid-level writer to a senior-level promotion.
- Maintained a cohesive, highly productive, fully remote team for almost 4 years in an environment of multiple reorganizations and high turnover.
- Achieved 100 percent on-time documentation delivery across all releases, including same-day documentation turnarounds for features disclosed the day before launch.
- Established genuine partnerships with product and engineering, with writer contributions to QA and product improvement recognized during every performance review period.
- Transformed overly technical, engineer-written documentation into accessible guidance for business users with limited technical backgrounds.
- Established release notes process from scratch, including patch notes and a system for gathering information from engineering teams.
- Conceived and implemented comprehensive docs redesign for rapid product evolution and growing content needs.
- Led API documentation standardization to OpenAPI spec, collaborating with engineering to better support enterprise use of product.
- Achieved ~70 percent time savings through strategic AI adoption, exceeding the company OKR of 30 percent time savings.
- Led platform migration from Hugo and CommonMark to Fern and MDX, including vendor evaluation, migration planning, and execution.
Manager of Technical Publications
Puppet — Portland, OR November 2019 – January 2022
- Managed team of eight technical writers documenting infrastructure automation and configuration management platform.
- Built strong team culture focused on trust and collaboration during transition to remote work.
- Advocated for sustainable workloads and matched writers to appropriate projects based on strengths
- Evolved team priorities to emphasize walkthrough documentation and getting-started guides
- Coordinated writing engagements across product teams and functions
- Mentored writers and established career development plans
Technical Writer
Puppet — Portland, OR September 2014 – November 2019
- Served as technical publications lead for Platform product working group
- Led restructuring of open-source Puppet platform documentation into predictable information architecture
- Replaced idiosyncratic style with clear, consistent voice for all experience levels
- Embedded with engineering teams as trusted technical partner
- Provided UX feedback that influenced product improvements
- Contributed to migration to DITA standard and docs-as-code workflows
- Helped onboard and train new writers
- Improved release processes and information flow from engineering to documentation
Education
Master of Arts, Technical and Professional Writing Portland State University — Graduate Assistant
Bachelor of Arts, Journalism magna cum laude University of Oregon, School of Journalism and Communication
Skills & Expertise
Documentation Leadership Team building and mentoring, documentation strategy, information architecture, cross-functional collaboration, process development
Technical Skills API documentation, OpenAPI standards, docs-as-code workflows, DITA, content strategy, technical editing, AI-assisted documentation, Global English and internationalization
Tools & Platforms Git/GitHub, Markdown, MDX, Hugo, Fern, Docusaurus, Vale, Markdown linting
Domain Experience AI/ML platforms, infrastructure automation, configuration management, developer tools